The present invention generally relates to a method and system for compressing a video clip having image and audio content and, more particularly, to video clip compression that reduces the image content of the video clip based upon an analysis of one or more attributes of the video frames.
Short Message Service (SMS) or text messaging is increasing rapidly in popularity. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) adds rich media such as rich texts, sounds, graphics, pictures and eventually even video to SMS. It gives users a whole new experience of person-to-person communication with possibilities they can create, edit and customize at will. These capabilities extend well beyond the mobile-to-mobile world, and can involve other computing devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDA) and personal computers. Simon Buckingham, CEO of Mobile Streams believes that: “The transition from Short Message Service (SMS) to Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is as important on mobile phones as the transition from DOS to Windows was for the PC. It represents a revolution.”
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)—sometimes called Multimedia Messaging System—is a communications technology developed by 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) that allows users to exchange multimedia communications between capable mobile phones and other devices. An extension to the Short Message Service (SMS) protocol, MMS defines a way to send and receive, almost instantaneously, wireless messages that include images, audio, and video clips in addition to text, with the possibility of supporting the transmission of streaming video once the technology is fully developed.
One problem associated with the sending, storing, and transmission of digital video clips, that contain both image and audio content, is that they generally are very large data files, at least when compared to audio and photo files. Such files cannot generally be conveniently handled by bandwidth limited networks, such as those available for many mobile phones, and impossible to send as streaming video.
Presently, Full SMS with video can only be enabled with broadband networks (3G) which transmit between 384 and 2000 kbps (kilobits per second). As a result, commonly used lower bandwidth networks, such as 2.5G technologies (e.g., General Packet Radio Service or Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution) having transmission speeds between 115 and 384 kbps, are generally unable to support full video transmissions.
Embodiments of the present invention provide solutions to these and other problems, and offer other advantages over the prior art.